Comics Recap #2: Wonder Woman New 52

Protect the baby!

About a month ago the entire New 52 series of Wonder Woman went on sale and so I decided to buy the whole thing in large part because I was bored and also because the Onion's AV Club recommended it as the best DC mainstream title of the year.

I've read a few New 52 titles and generally what they do is have a story arc that lasts a few issues and then move on to another story arc.  Brian Azzarello takes a different approach by having essentially the same story arc through all 25 current issues.  (Spoilers ahead!)

That story arc can be summarized as "protect the baby."  For some reason Zeus has gone missing from Mount Olympus.  But if you know anything about Greek mythology you should know how promiscuous the sky god is, so it's no surprise that he's gotten some girl in Virginia knocked up with his baby.  For whatever reason this baby is some kind of Chosen One and so Wonder Woman decides to protect the girl, which draws the ire of Hera and other gods.

While it is essentially one story arc it has different phases.  First Wonder Woman takes the girl to Paradise Island, which leads to her mother being turned into clay and her fellow Amazonian warriors into snakes.  Over 20 issues later and they're still that way!  Eventually she tangles with Hades and Apollo and so on until (spoiler!) she becomes God of War.  Which come to think of it except for the protect the baby thing was the plot of that video game series.

(Another spoiler!) Azzarello does a major revision to Wonder Woman's origin story.  Since George Perez's reboot of the franchise in the 80s the idea has been that Wonder Woman was made from clay by her mother, who was unable to bear children.  Her mother then prayed to the gods to give her a child, so they made the clay baby come to life.  It's kind of like Adam in the Bible (or Pinocchio) I suppose but as far as I know it's a unique origin for a hero.

In Azzarello's version Wonder Woman's mother Hippolyta is just another in Zeus's long line of conquests.  Again if you know anything about Greek mythology you know Zeus was always coming down to get with some mortal girl, often as a cow or swan or some other critter.  (The Greeks were into a lot of nasty stuff including pedophilia.)

I found Azzarello's version boring just because it's been done so often.  Hercules, Perseus, and Theseus are all examples of demigod heroes.  In comics we already have full gods like Thor, so who cares if she's half a god?  Yawn.  You might say the clay thing is a little silly, but at least it's something that hasn't been done hundreds of times before.  Taking away that unique characteristic for something so shopworn didn't really sit well with me.

As I've said the story follows the same arc through every single issue.  I found this a little annoying after a while.  Maybe in part because I'm used to story arcs that don't last for over two years, so as it went on I kept expecting at some point for it wrap up in some fashion.  I guess that won't happen until Azzarello stops writing the series.  It might help if I understood the significance of the baby a little better.  I mean since Zeus has literally hundreds of kids and grandkids and great-grandkids and so on by now (and we added one more with Wonder Woman) who cares that he has another?  Why go to all this trouble to kill it?

If you read or even heard about the New 52 Justice League then you'd know Wonder Woman hooked up with Superman--they even have a comic together now!  But you won't find any of that in this series.  You won't find her traditional boyfriend Steve Trevor either.  In fact the closest to a love interest is a sham wedding to Hades.  Really she has no personal life at all because again every single issue is consumed with the "protect the baby" story.  Which is a shame to me because it's always nice when authors humanize these larger-than-life characters.  It's one of the big reasons people like Spider-Man and why I really liked the early issues of Grant Morrison's Action Comics run.

No wonder the Olympians faded into myth.

I don't usually criticize the artwork since I can't draw, but ugh a lot of this was really bad looking.  Why are most of the gods freaks?  Poseidon is some kind of giant squid-fish thing and Hades has a candelabra melting over his face and Demeter is a giant stalk of celery or something.  Even some of the human-looking ones look weird.  The artist at least did keep Wonder Woman looking more or less like the action figure I have screwing Superman on a shelf.

Count the last bit as one of the positives.  Tony wanted to know why I'd keep reading something I wasn't all that happy with.  It wasn't that I really hated this; I just tend to dwell on the negative.  As tiring as the story could become at times I did keep reading.  I'm annoyed it hasn't wrapped up because I'm not about to start paying $4 an issue for something that could keep going for another 24 months.  I'm not made of money!  And at least unlike the Spider-Woman series I read she doesn't have to get bailed out by a male hero all the time.  Though there are a lot of male gods/demigods who lend a helping hand.

Anyway, if you like Clash of the Titans this is a good series for you.  If you're more of a superhero traditionalist then not so much.